


These Hands Have Never Healed

by local_doom_void



Series: Methods of Humanity [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adults Making Questionable Choices, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dementors, Gen, Hot Chocolate, Identity Issues, Mentor Voldemort (Harry Potter), Murder, Parent Voldemort (Harry Potter), Professor Tom Riddle, Professor Voldemort really but the tags..., Protectiveness, Rescue Missions, Sane Voldemort (Harry Potter)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:21:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26051797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/local_doom_void/pseuds/local_doom_void
Summary: It's a sad day when, as far as he can tell, only a retired Dark Lord believes that Sirius Black cannot be worth the emotional and mental health of the entire child population of the British wizarding world.Lord Thomas Voldemort Riddle tries something new, something nostalgic, and something new again.
Relationships: Bartemius Crouch Jr. & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Hermione Granger & Tom Riddle | Voldemort, Ron Weasley & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Series: Methods of Humanity [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855237
Comments: 71
Kudos: 737





	These Hands Have Never Healed

**Author's Note:**

> Do note that Voldemort isn't omniscient. He's just experienced and good at noticing patterns. Some of the events which happen in this may appear to be unrelated, due to my sticking only to his POV. I've tried to leave clues as to what's going on behind the scenes that Voldemort does not have access to, things that readers familiar with Potter and/or with my work may pick up on. I may amend the end note at some point to include a more detailed layout of such events, if I get questions.
> 
> But while I'm at it – has anyone ever noticed how many damn side plots are going on in PoA?? This year is pure chaos. Let Voldemort rest, he's just a tired old man.
> 
> Also, this is long as fuck because my entire writing group (who is reading this, hi y'all) voted to not chapterise it. Whaddayagonnado.

Harry is frowning at the newspaper. This isn’t too unusual, though the reasons vary. Voldemort, however, is being tempted by that frown to question his sanity, and he is counting down the seconds until the boy inevitably says something.

Until that happens, though, he is quite content to munch on his toast in silence.

“I thought you said _Peter_ betrayed my parents to you,” Harry finally says, mouth all twisted up. His eyes have not left the Prophet.

It takes a moment for Voldemort to comprehend which Peter Harry means. When he comprehends it, he too starts to frown. “That’s correct,” he says slowly. “Pettigrew did that.”

For some reason this does not fix the consternation. “But if he did that, then why was _Sirius Black_ in prison for the same thing?!”

… Sirius Who?

Voldemort wandlessly reaches out and yanks the paper into his hands. Harry doesn’t even yelp in mock affront, which makes the retired Dark Lord think this must be serious. That photo on the front page is certainly Sirius Black, although for another moment Voldemort has no idea who on Earth this man is. But as he looks further he sees the nose, the hollows in his cheeks forming a particular shape of the skull.

A Black – a proper Black. Regulus Black’s brother? Orion’s son? Both are likely true, if not anymore. Orion is dead and both Voldemort and the wizarding public have no idea where Regulus got off to. Voldemort thinks he’s likely dead, but then again, so was he for a while.

What’s marginally more interesting is that Black escaped from Azkaban, and the Ministry – apparently – has absolutely no idea how he did that.

“Fun,” is all Voldemort says.

“What’s going on?” Harry demands, apparently not to be satisfied.

“Am I supposed to know that?”

“They’re saying he was your Right Hand Death Eater.”

They are? Voldemort actually looks at the text of the article and sees that this is, shockingly, an accurate assessment. He can’t help the scoff.

“He was not,” he snorts, and folds the paper up. Harry snatches it back. “His brother Regulus was Marked, but not Sirius. No, that man was as far as I am aware too attached at the hip to your father to even consider betraying him. I suppose the public wanted somebody to blame for the incident besides me and picked him… He is a Black, after all. Stereotypically Dark and with disdain for rules and legalities. He would have been an easy selection.”

Harry merely chews aggressively on his lower lip, and stares daggers at the newspaper.

He contemplates asking why, before deciding he really does not care.

  


They are steadfastly ignoring the Sirius Black news – rather, Voldemort is ignoring it, because the man isn’t a danger, and Harry is following it with a strange sort of viciousness that doesn’t make much sense to Voldemort. He double-checks that Harry is aware the man was not a Death Eater, nor responsible for his parental _situation_ , but Harry only nods vigorously and agrees. He then gets right back to scribbling letters to his muggleborn friend and glaring at newspaper clippings.

Well, Voldemort supposes, he did odder things when he was a child.

  


When they go shopping for Harry’s school supplies, Voldemort makes the executive decision to not yet extract the money from Harry’s vault. He can do that later. For the moment, the newspapers and op-eds and gossip columns are making an alarming amount of noise about how Harry Potter must be protected from Sirius Black. They even get ambushed by such a discussion during the trip to Madam Malkin’s to obtain new school robes for Harry, and Voldemort is left in the strange position of having to get Harry out of the shop post-haste before the boy can try to bite the woman’s head off for saying that Sirius Black is a filthy ne’er-do-well.

“Is there some reason you seem to have lost your senses?” he mutters to Potter as he hauls the boy to the bookstore (not Flourish and Blotts, thank you, he knows stores that carry the same books for far better prices).

“I’m the most sensible person here, thanks,” Harry mutters back.

Voldemort thinks perhaps he is starting to understand why parents complain so often of headaches.

“I keep telling you, he did nothing as claimed,” he adds as they enter the bookstore.

“I know he did,” Harry says. “That’s not the point.”

  


A letter from miss Granger, addressed to the both of them, is waiting when they return from shopping. This is unusual enough that Voldemort opens it immediately instead of waiting for the evening, and he ends up quite glad that he did not take money from the boy’s vault.

 _Dumbledore and this other wizard I didn’t recognise came poking around today_ , she writes. _They were asking if I’d seen or heard from Harry. I told them that we exchanged letters, of course, but not that Harry had been staying anywhere different that I was aware of. I think the only reason they haven’t asked the Weasleys yet is because they’re in Egypt. But I’m very sure they know Harry isn’t at the Dursleys._

“Bastard,” Voldemort mutters again. Harry, for his part, seems horrified and pale.

“What if they take me back?” he asks when Voldemort inquires.

“Come now, Harry,” Voldemort hums. He carefully folds up the letter. “I am quite a bit smarter than that. We have two and a half weeks to come up with something reasonable.”

This doesn’t seem to encourage the boy, so he considers another possibility. “Alternatively,” he proposes, “I could go murder the Dursleys and there would be no further concern?”

“You shouldn’t murder people,” Harry says and shakes his head. Voldemort, however, feels like the boy’s heart isn’t really in it.

Perhaps he’ll entertain the idea, anyway, for a boring day during the school year. It might very well be quite satisfying.

  


The best idea Voldemort has is the one he’s certain Harry won’t approve of. He is therefore surprised when Harry does, in fact, approve – new glamour and all. Lily Evans did not actually have a magical cousin suitable to potentially act as Harry’s uncle, but the fake documents are easy enough to shuffle into the various muggle record departments. Of all the crimes Voldemort is best at, forgery and fraud is the only one which can compete with torturous murder.

As the uncle, he withdraws the appropriate money from Harry’s vault for school supplies – equivalent to Harry’s previous withdrawals, which were in fact insufficient – and then scoots off down Knockturne before Albus Dumbledore and the Aurors can show up. Harry, under Voldemort’s explicit guidance and with multiple drafts, writes a letter to Albus Dumbledore about how he is staying with a different relative of his mother – actually magical – and how he won’t be going back to the Dursleys, because they lock him in a cupboard and don’t feed him, but here he gets a whole bedroom to himself and three meals a day, thanks very much.

Voldemort charms the letter to be untraceable, and they leave the situation alone until later.

Dumbledore does not try to reply – not even to the dummy address Voldemort set up just in case of that eventuality. It’s curious. He wonders what mood the man will be in when Thomas Moregrave reports back to school for prep week.

The answer, as it turns out, is morose. It’s a fascinating mood on such a damnably self-confident holier-than-thou man, so Voldemort pays it special attention indeed. Thomas Moregrave only pays it the attention required of him as a teacher who vaguely likes his boss but who does not often interact with him on a personal level.

Asking Dumbledore himself is getting a bit too close for his comfort, though. He asks Minerva instead, as they make their way back to the offices, and all he discovers is that not only does Minerva have no real idea why Albus Dumbledore is morose – she attributes it to Black, and to Black’s escape.

Voldemort frowns to himself once he has parted from her and headed for his own classroom. He knows the true reason Dumbledore is morose, of course – or he is quite certain he knows it.

  


He does not redecorate his classroom. He does redecorate his office, which, while much rebuilt from the explosive cursebreaking he indulged in last year, now has a larger window as a result of the destruction. Voldemort squints at it for a while, and then sets to remaking it.

He has an idea.

Three hours later, he hasn’t actually worked on his new syllabi, but he does have a window with a windowseat, and enough alienorum wards on the exterior of the structure that his expanded view of the grounds is very, very difficult to notice indeed.

When he gets home, Harry is pinning old newspaper clippings regarding his erstwhile godfather to one of the corkboards in Voldemort’s library room, and linking them with red string. Voldemort stands in the doorway for a long moment and stares, still wearing Thomas Moregrave’s professorial garb, before turning away and going to the kitchen to make dinner.

Why, he wonders, is everyone in his life so obsessed with Sirius Black?

  


Harry has a Hogsmeade weekend permission slip. For some reason, he looks uncertain.

Voldemort signs it in the name of the false uncle without comment, and hands it straight back.

He does not, however, allow Harry to spend the last night before the Express with the Weasley family in Diagon. He has no intention of having that same false uncle stand up in person to the inevitable scrutiny that Molly Weasley has been trying to impress on him via the dummy address. He wonders for a moment how she got it, and suspects Dumbledore of being responsible.

He does not speak any of these thoughts to Harry, because he’s playing frisbee with Nagini in the backyard at the moment, and it will most likely just upset the child and ruin their game. He will tell Harry tomorrow.

Due to the necessity of Voldemort having to be at Hogwarts in order to be a professor who is helping prepare for the welcoming feast and the coming school year, as well as to the necessity of Harry’s ‘uncle’ being hard to find, he brings Harry to the train as early as possible. Nobody else is around at 7 am – magical automation takes care of the Express until 9 am hits.

Harry watches it for a long moment. Voldemort watches it, too, and tries to find the spark of excitement he thinks Tom Riddle might have felt upon seeing it after every summer. Or was it only the first time that he was excited? Had it morphed, soon, from excitement to relief?

… Was it ever excitement, after the first time, or always relief thereafter?

For some reason Harry isn’t moving. Voldemort looks down at him. “I have it on good authority the train will not eat you,” he tells the child.

“I know that,” Harry protests. His voice, however, does not have the same heat that it usually does when Harry protests something, and Voldemort finds him frowning down at the boy. Is he sick? That will put some kind of a wrench into his plans, for sure. He does not think that it is exactly appropriate to leave a child alone on the platform when he is ill, but he also can’t exactly stay with him, or take Harry to a healer, without losing time that Thomas Moregrave would have no excuse to have lost.

He presses the back of a hand to Harry’s forehead, a mugglish way to divine fever, and Harry squints at him in consternation. “What are you doing??”

“You are acting off. I am checking for a fever. Do you feel nauseous?”

Harry’s face does a strange sort of wobble. Voldemort has no idea what sort of emotion is the right name to use to accompany it, but before he can try to find one, the child has launched himself at Voldemort and is gripping him around the waist, face buried in his robes.

The retired Dark Lord freezes. His eyes dart left, then right – nobody. Nobody is around, as he just said mere seconds ago.

“... Harry?” he tries.

“‘ll miss you,” the child mumbles, muffled, into his robes.

“Miss – what? But I am not going anywhere? Well, I suppose I am going to Hogwarts,” Voldemort corrects. “But you are also going to be at Hogwarts.”

“S’not the same.”

“You holding on to me will not render me forced to take the train with you, I’m sorry to say.”

That statement makes Harry lift his head. But instead of releasing Voldemort, he only frowns up at him. “I know that. This is just – I just wanted…”

Voldemort waits for more information, but none comes. Yet for some reason his nonaction is making Harry look more and more ill, and the child takes his hands away.

“Fine,” he says, and moves as if to grab his trunk.

Voldemort feels incredibly confused.

“How am I to know if I can fulfill your request if you don’t say what you want?” he blurts out, taking a step forward and grabbing Harry’s shoulder. There is something strange shifting under his limbs, making his skin crawl. His stomach feels as though a hole has been drilled through the bottom.

Harry stares at him. The ill look is gone, fortunately, and with it the crawling feeling lessens.

“Just… it was just a hug,” the child mutters.

Voldemort blinks.

“A hug?”

Harry looks at Voldemort. Voldemort looks at Harry.

Slowly, Harry nods. “You… know about hugs, right?”

Voldemort has to think about that. But before he can get very far, there is a horrified exclamation.

“Nobody’s ever _hugged_ you?!”

He feels strangely frozen by Harry’s wide-eyed, horrified stare. He looks away and breaks their eye contact, because it is making his stomach churn. With careful mental fingers, he flips through drawer after drawer of index card memories related to his childhood – to him. It’s all dreary orphanage and hunger and coldness to start, shifting to warmer temperatures thanks to Hogwarts robes and warming charms, but to just as cold people looking at him narrowly, with disdain – suspicion. Normal enough reactions. Occasionally a professor exclaims over his understanding of a complex concept for his age-level.

People very rarely touch him beyond a handshake. He honestly does not know why they would.

Then he was a Dark Lord, and. Well.

“I do not think so, no,” he finally says. “Unless having a large snake around your shoulders counts? In which case I have been hugged by Nagini multiple times.”

Based on Harry’s continued look of horror, Voldemort concludes that apparently this is not a hug.

“It’s okay,” the child says firmly. “I had to learn about hugs too. Ron and Hermione taught me – I mean,” he rambles, “I was eleven when they taught me, and you’re old, but you’re smart, so I think you can handle it.”

“Oh?” is all Voldemort can seem to say.

“Yeah,” Harry says, and steps up again. The arms wrap once more around his waist, and Voldemort has to consider the sensation with more clarity now that he knows the words for it. ‘Hug’...

“Now you should put your arms around my shoulders,” Harry is saying firmly.

“Is this not yet a hug?”

“I’m hugging you, but you’re not hugging me. You have to hug me back to make it count.”

Interesting. Voldemort wants to consider this form of acting-upon further, but Harry is staring up at him both stubbornly and expectantly. Despite the fact that he has no idea what he is doing, and frankly feels rather idiotic, he experimentally wraps his own arms around Harry’s shoulders in mimicry of the way Harry’s are laid about his own body.

“Now you squeeze,” says Harry, and demonstratively squeezes Voldemort’s waist.

 _Why_ , exactly? Voldemort wants to ask. But he is a bit distracted by the very strange sensation of being ‘properly hugged’, and he also has to focus on being sure not to squeeze too hard. His ritually enhanced strength could likely crush Harry more than desired, and he has no desire whatsoever to harm the boy.

Oh.

He has no…

_Oh._

  


After their hug, Voldemort releases Harry into the train, and this time Harry goes and looks happy enough to go. He’s taken about fifteen minutes longer than he wanted to, but it’s not enough to jeopardise Thomas Moregrave’s schedule, so he quickly apparates away and gets his things together.

“ _I miss the hatchling_ ,” Nagini moans from the bed as he packs Thomas Moregrave’s clothing and accoutrements into a number of trunks and travel packages.

“ _The hatchling is going to be at the learning nest with us, Nagini_ ,” he hisses back as he throws some blank journals into a satchel. “ _You’ll probably see him again tonight._ ”

“ _It’s not the same, Voldemort. I miss the hatchling in the back field._”

Voldemort makes an irritated hiss from the back of his throat, and can’t come up with a proper rebuttal.

  


For some reason, Thomas Moregrave gets a standing ovation when he is announced as a returning Defense professor. Voldemort wonders just how starved the school has been for a competent, stable teacher, and with that he wonders if this is going to draw attention he does not want.

Ah well. If it happens, he’ll deal with it.

Apparently, professor Kettleburn has also retired. Good – he ought to have retired years ago, after the manticore incident. Fool.

The new Care professor is a scarred yet timid looking man, who is announced as Remus Lupin. For a moment this name sounds familiar, but Voldemort struggles to pin down why it sounds familiar. He supposes he can look him up later.

Strangely, the door opens once the feast has begun. When Voldemort looks up, he sees Minerva walking in – so that’s why her seat was empty – followed by… Harry? And by miss Granger?

What on Earth...

Voldemort eyes Minerva as she comes around the table and sits in the empty seat. Next to him – for some reason, she likes him. He wonders about this sometimes, and the implications of it.

“No detentions you need managed, I hope?” he murmurs to her once the chatter of children has filled the hall and granted potential privacy to conversation.

“No,” she says. “I’m sure you’ll hear sooner or later – those blasted dementors came onto the train, Thomas.”

His body goes very cold.

Of course, Voldemort was aware of the dementors. (He doesn’t see the logic, not at all.) The Ministry had put in a request for shifts of five of the things to patrol from the air, at a distance from the grounds proper, and Thomas Moregrave had made one of the most vocal arguments against even that during the staff meeting. He is still desperately displeased by it all, but he is not willing to bring the force to bear that might have been required to remove them.

Rather, he had not been willing. He is wondering if perhaps he needs to be willing, as his gaze shoots to Harry and miss Granger without his own permission. They seem alright – certainly ensouled, which is the most important success – but Harry is subdued. In fact, now that he looks…

The entire school seems subdued. As he sweeps the hall, gaze keen from years spent as a paranoid Dark Lord, he sees a few younger children crying at the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw tables, one even at the Slytherin table. Many of the older students look haunted.

They came onto the train…

He bites down the growling hiss that wants to spring out of him, and then wonders when he became so protective of children, in general. But does that matter?

“I see,” is all he says.

  


He predicts children – or at least, predicts one child – in his office that night. He is proven right. To his slight surprise, there are in fact three children in his office, and he is not entirely sure what to do now.

Then again.

Harry still looks shakey, and that makes his course of action clear. Voldemort gets up immediately and retrieves the cup of hot chocolate that he prepared for just this purpose, forcing it into Harry’s hands. The child is trying to insist that he’s fine, but he is clearly not fine, and Voldemort tells him so and orders him to sit.

Harry sits, muted, in his usual armchair. Voldemort takes the opportunity to turn to the other two children.

“Have either of you been given chocolate?” he asks.

Miss Granger hesitantly nods. Mister Weasley is squinting at Voldemort, as if assessing, so Voldemort meets his eyes without hesitation. “Did you have chocolate after your dementor exposure, mister Weasley?” he asks, insistent.

“Yeah,” mumbles the boy. “Lupin – I mean, professor Lupin – he gave everyone chocolate.”

“Everyone?” Voldemort feels his eyebrows lifting. “The entire train?”

“... Er.”

Clearly they don’t know. Voldemort sighs.

“You three may… what do they call it… ‘hang out’ in here while I go speak with the healer. Make sure Harry drinks the entire cup.” He directs this order to miss Granger, who nods seriously and then switches her focus to Harry. The boy guiltily lifts his cup and takes a gulp, which Voldemort finds pleasing.

As it happens, Poppy Pomphrey is in as much of a strop as Voldemort thinks he might be. They commiserate briefly over the incompetence and the recklessness of the Ministry, the sheer idiocy of everyone involved except the people who want the dementors gone, and once she is aware that it is unclear if the school has at large been given enough chocolate to combat dementor exposure, they cook up a plot to force-feed the entire student body hot chocolate tomorrow morning. She leaves to get the house elves on board. Voldemort returns to his office, and finds the children all sitting on the window seat, staring out at the grounds.

“Are those them?” Harry asks when Voldemort comes back in.

“Are those who?” he echoes.

“There,” Harry says, and points. Voldemort comes to stand behind him and peers out in the direction indicated. At first he sees nothing, but then –

There, just barely visible above the treeline, a dark, strangely smokey shape drifts through the air, pieces gouting off and rejoining the whole in an unnatural motion.

Voldemort hisses out a curse.

  


“Good morning,” he tells his first class the next morning – seventh year, his most advanced NEWTs students. Just the one class, as tends to happen in seventh year. The door slams behind him as Voldemort strolls down the ramp in the center of the classroom to the lecture dias, scrolls and books from an all-night raid of the library and restricted sections tucked under one arm and mug tightly held by the other.

“In better circumstances,” he begins, “I would welcome you to your final Defense course at Hogwarts, which I am sure you are all dying to speed through as fast as possible so you can become adults, whatever value you place on that.” He dumps the books and scrolls onto his desk and turns, taking a long drag from the remaining coffee-hot chocolate mix he’s been drinking all night. “Unfortunately, as we have found ourselves in a school currently surrounded by eldritch horrors, despite what I assure you were my most strident objections, I am forced to uproot your syllabus. This is a real-world application of what you are supposed to be learning in this class, so you will engage with it. Does this make anybody wish to drop the class?”

He waits, drinking from his mug again. The room is still, but silent, and altogether rather solemn. Nobody makes to stand.

Voldemort feels suddenly, and very strangely, proud of them.

“Good,” is all he says. A free hand pats the teetering stack of books behind him. It topples, but he doesn’t bother to right it. “I have scraped the library of every book that even so much as mentions dementors, demons, angels, ethereal beings, fae, or similar eldritch monsters. These are ours for the semester. In the interim, you will inform me of everything you currently know about dementors, and based on that knowledge we will then brainstorm methods by which a besieged school might mitigate, minimize, hold off, or even repel encroaching eldritch horrors, given that is populated mostly by minors and housed in a castle in a geographically isolated area.”

There is a sort of rustling anticipation at that. Voldemort doesn’t bother to analyse it for now.

“Williams!” He points to a startled Gryffindor student unlucky enough to be sat in the front row. “Go. You’re starting.”

Soon, all Voldemort has to do is manage the chalk that’s enchanted to take notes for him as he sits on his desk, for the students really do take to their assignment with gusto.

  


A dementor tries to approach him during that first weekend. He was in Honeydukes to arrange a year-long bulk deal of basic chocolate bars, and as he makes his way back, laden with space-expanded bags, the creature begins to waft up the hill towards him, nearly flat against the ground.

Voldemort realises abruptly that he cannot cast a Patronus. He thinks he ought to have remembered that sooner.

He hasn’t spoken Aklo in a very long while. But when he hisses ferally at the thing and walks faster, it stops approaching. Neither does it slink away. He feels as if he is being watched for the rest of the day, and wonders whether the things recognise him even through the transformation amulet he uses to become Thomas Moregrave.

The idea is… unsettling.

  


In the remainder of his classes for that first week, he adjusts his practice slightly. The topic of dementors remains the same. NEWT students brainstorm. OWL students are set to the relevant readings and told to return with essays. First and second years are treated more delicately, are not quite told so much of the situation, but are thoroughly instructed on proper safety procedures and informed that he expects everyone to maintain a stock of chocolate. If they have no access to chocolate, they may take from the stash he will be maintaining.

When Monday comes, and with it the first staff meeting of the school year, Voldemort is not sure what’s taken over him in his fury to provide the school body with tools against the things on their doorstep. Yet he also can’t quite bring himself to regret it.

He does of course get asked why he altered his syllabus so drastically and without warning. Fortunately, he has his arguments, and the fact that a dementor tried to approach him on the way back from Honeydukes is even taken up with horror by the other professors as a validation of his ‘concerns’.

His ‘concerns’ are more grudges with teeth, but he will take it.

  


This is entirely Sirius Black’s fault. Voldemort thinks he may despise this man, despite never having met him. Sirius Black would certainly despise Voldemort, considering all Voldemort has done, so he sees no problem with taking up this new position.

(Harry might take issue. He can deal with that when it becomes one.)

  


One night, Voldemort is sitting on his new window-seat, glowering at the semi-solid shapes above the forest and drinking spiked hot chocolate to calm his temper, when there is a knock on his door.

He is about to frantically shuffle Nagini into the fireplace back to his private quarters when a voice speaks.

“Professor?”

Harry.

Voldemort waves the door open. Harry creeps in and closes it behind him, oddly quiet. It’s his first visit of the year, excepting the evening of the welcome feast, and Voldemort suddenly realises the gap is much larger than what he’d become used to. Realises part of why he was so furiously focused on the dementors.

“Do you have your chocolate?” Voldemort asks him.

Harry tugs an unwrapped bar out of his pocket and shows it to him. Voldemort nods approvingly, and it goes away again. But with that ritual out of the way, Harry is still standing there silently, and Voldemort finds he dislikes this.

“Is something the matter?” he asks.

“Um,” is all Harry says.

Voldemort waits.

“You did – ” Harry starts, and then cuts himself off. Worryingly, he sniffles, as if he is about to cry. “You, I mean.”

Voldemort slowly sits up from where he is leaning against the pillows and the window. This does not feel like it is going to be a conversation for which he should be reclining, even partially.

“I,” he echoes.

“When the dementor came at me on the train I heard you killing my mum,” Harry says in a rush, and then bursts into tears.

Oh.

Well, that was not what he expected.

For a moment he sits there, stunned, because he really does not know what to do in this situation. Then it hits him all over again that Harry is crying, and he rushes to stand and shove the child into his armchair before putting the throw blanket on top of him. (Again.)

“Did you actually ask her to – were you actually going to not kill her, if she stepped aside?” Harry hiccups finally, after a long and awkward five minutes.

Voldemort doesn’t particularly like thinking about that particular Halloween, considering that was the moment that everything went so off for him. The decade following wasn’t particularly pleasant, either. However, because it’s Harry asking him, he sighs and puts on his thinking face as he tries to find his scattered recollections.

“I would have,” he says slowly. “I was not actually expecting her to do it, though, and… well, you know what occurred.”

Harry frowns at him, even though his eyes are red. He’s now almost entirely curled up beneath the blanket, only his head poking out. “Why even offer?” he asks.

“Severus Snape begged me not to kill her,” Voldemort says simply. “I told him I would offer her the option, because I did not care to deal with his inevitable breakdown afterwards.”

“What?” Now the sniffling is going away again, and Harry wipes his eyes before looking bewildered. “Snape did? But I thought he told you the – the Prophecy? And he hates me and James? Why would he care?”

“He did hate James Potter,” Voldemort confirms. “But as I understood it, he and your mother were some sort of childhood friends. He retained a fondness for her long after their friendship ended over his political affiliation with me.”

Harry’s face has closed off. It’s the look Voldemort has labeled ‘stubborn child’. “So what,” he says, “he asked you to not kill mum, and to… what? Just kill me and him? What about how she would feel with us dead?!”

“While I share your incredulity, I can only tell you what happened, not so much the why of it.”

The child under the blanket scoffs, and glowers at the floor for a long moment. Voldemort sips his spiked hot chocolate.

“... I am both curious how much you hear, and unwilling to ask you to recount it to me,” he finally says.

“It’s not a lot,” Harry says. “It’s – ”

“I just said you did not have to recount it to me.”

Harry stares at him, wide-eyed, for a moment.

“... I don’t?”

“Of course not,” Voldemort snorts. “Clearly it’s distressing to you. Besides, it’s not as if I enjoy thinking about the night I died either.”

“Oh,” says Harry, very quietly.

  


They don’t speak about Halloween again. However, Harry does now come to Voldemort with frequency more approaching the end of his second year, and Voldemort finds himself slipping into that altogether pleasant routine. Dementors aside, Harry finds plenty of things to complain about – Severus Snape, how he’s one of the only Gryffindors in his ancient runes class, how the Care professor keeps looking at him strangely, Severus Snape, how miss Granger always complains about divination class but refusing to drop it…

Needless to say, Voldemort prefers it this way. He is quite certain Nagini does too.

Of course it does not last.

Through some horrible twist of fate, Voldemort remains ignorant of the Incident, as he later refers to it, until three days afterwards. Most galling of all, of course, is the idea that he may not have discovered the truth at all if he had not entered the year three Gryffindor/Slytherin Defense class one day, gathered up the essays from last time, and declared they would be discussing boggarts.

He of course did not expect enthusiasm, given the wizarding children would know what those were. However, he also did not expect Draco Malfoy to burst into hysterical tears and rush from the classroom without asking to be excused, nor did he expect the horrified, tense, uncomfortable silence all of the children proceeded to display.

“... I daresay I have missed some context,” he says slowly.

Harry, Morgana preserve him, stands up first and relates the entire story. As Voldemort listens, shifting steadily from bemusement to horror, he finds that he suddenly remembers where he has heard of Remus Lupin before.

Is this anger?

He has not been properly wrathful in a while.

“Class is cancelled. You may go about your business,” he tells the third years, and carefully puts their essays away for later grading. “Somebody from Slytherin, find mister Malfoy and bring him to the infirmary. If you cannot find him, find one of your prefects and inform them of the matter, if you please.”

There are subdued nods as the children finish packing up and shuffle out the door. Harry, miss Granger, and mister Weasley are lingering, but Voldemort gives them a stern look and waves them away as well.

Once they are all gone, he marches out onto the grounds and heads for the Care classroom that’s been set up outside.

“Professor Lupin,” he calls out once he’s approached. “A moment?”

They are looking at… some sort of pixie in an appropriate terrarrium. Remus Lupin looks bewildered to have his class interrupted, but sets the students to taking observational notes, and heads up the slope to join Voldemort.

“Professor Moregrave,” says the man, and smiles faintly once he gets there. “May I call you Thomas? We haven’t had much opportunity to talk, but as colleagues – ”

Voldemort takes out Thomas Moregrave’s wand and sets up a privacy ward that will obscure their facial expressions and their words. “To prevent the inevitable student gossip,” is all he says when the man squints at him worriedly. Then again, maybe the worry is due to Voldemort’s smile. He suspects it might have teeth.

“... Is there something I can help you with?” Remus Lupin asks neutrally.

“A walkthrough of what sort of idiotic thought process made you believe it would be just peachy to expose students to a boggart with minimal preparation would be appreciated, first of all,” Voldemort snaps. “My entire third year class seems to be traumatised, mister Malfoy to the point of running out of the room in tears, and I had to hear from – ” he cannot say ‘Harry’ “ – mister Potter that not only did they have to witness yet another up close and personal dementor due to mister Potter’s boggart, they also had to see an apparition of – ” what on Earth does he call himself?! “ – _Voldemort?_ ”

Well, there that is. Voldemort tells himself that Thomas Moregrave is from France and so he has an excuse.

From the wince on the man’s face, he has no good counter to Voldemort’s claims. Instead, he has the gall to look sheepish, and rubs his face. “I thought it would be a good, practical experience,” he murmurs. “They’re third years – they have grown up entirely in peacetime. I realised that Harry’s boggart might have been an issue, but I never intended him to – ”

Voldemort sees red for a moment, and can’t quite pinpoint why.

“You idiot,” he settles for snarling. Lupin physically recoils. “Age has nothing to do with life experience, Lupin. A thirteen year old child could well have been a victim of abuse. They could have witnessed a horrible accident, car or otherwise, could have seen a fire where somebody died, could have been in a hospital watching a family member slowly expire. They could have been targeted by other children for bullying vicious enough to make them an anxious mess at the sight of their tormentor. Anyone with a brain knows that mister Malfoy’s father was found dead in their manor this summer!”

Never mind that he had been the executioner of that murder. Ah well. He goes on, regardless. “Anyone who bothered to think critically for even a second should have realised that _even if_ you somehow miraculously had a group of students who had no real traumas in their past, to have the students all go at it in front of their classmates is just giving fodder to them? Say a child’s boggart is a spider. Voila, you have given every other child in that class the tools to terrorise that child!”

He pauses to catch his breath, and to marvel at himself for his sustained rant.

“Surely you, of all people, should recognise how irrationally cruel children can be,” Voldemort spits, and glowers.

Remus Lupin, apparently, does not know how to respond.

“I’ll be reporting this to Albus and Minerva, if they haven’t gotten wind already,” Voldemort says, and cancels the privacy spell. “Good day. Kindly don’t try to run a Defense lesson in the Care classroom ever again.”

On his way back to the castle, and then to the infirmary, Voldemort contemplates how to feel about the fact that Draco Malfoy apparently knows – suspects? fears? – that his father was murdered by Voldemort. Where did he get this certainty, and how far does it extend? There is of course nothing to link Thomas Moregrave to Voldemort, and Voldemort very carefully left no evidence at the scene, but…

Narcissa, he realises as he enters the hospital wing. Of course.

Mister Malfoy is yet in the wing, sitting in a comfortable chair near the windows and looking forlorn and uncomfortable. Voldemort allows himself to feel professorial relief that the child was found, and carefully puts away thoughts of his murderous summer hobby. He apologises to the boy for scaring him – assures him he did not know what professor Lupin had done. They will not have to face a boggart head-on in his class – however, he will expect class attendance and homework completed. Draco Malfoy, to his slight credit, nods.

Voldemort goes after giving the child some extra chocolate.

  


Nothing comes of his report against Lupin – not that he expected it to. But he enjoys having a paper trail, in case he later needs to enforce his opinions on somebody.

  


Despite his own inability, Voldemort drills his NEWT students until the Patronus is something they can do. He pulls in as much reading on the theory as is needed, even to the point of polling Severus Snape on his own experience – as he knows the man can indeed cast it.

He contemplates trying to teach it to himself, as well, but gives it up as a bad job.

Once the NEWT students can produce Patroni, Voldemort sets up interclass activities that involve the NEWT students teaching the various OWL students, all under his direction. The study the NEWT students have been making of the nature of dementors, and of their habits, apparently proves invaluable to the learning theory. (Another motivator appears to be necessity, as fifth and fourth years manage to produce corporeal patroni after some months of work and with carefully curated field trips onto the grounds.)

It figures that somebody would notice what Voldemort was doing. He suspects a student mentioned it to a Ministry-employed parent in a letter, and from there notes were compared until word got out. That is how gossip works. Because of this, one morning, Lord Thomas Voldemort Riddle-Moregrave receives a rather rude letter from a certain Bartemius Crouch, informing the alleged Frenchman in no uncertain terms that he had better stop helping his students to drive dementors away from the forest edges, actions which are apparently “obstructions of justice”.

Sirius Black cannot possibly be worth the emotional and mental health of the entire child population of the British wizarding world, can he?

Voldemort would have folded up the letter. He would have placed it in his files and promptly ignored everything it said. He is still going to ignore the not-so-subtle warning and continue to instruct his students on how to defend against eldritch horrors.

But...

The signature catches his eye.

There is a ‘Senior’ missing from the end.

For the first time in a long while, Voldemort feels that strange, frantic urge to run that people get when they do not know who they are.

  


Barty. _Barty._

How could he forget – ?!

  


Says the newspaper, Barty Crouch Junior was accused of assisting with the torture of Frank and Alice Longbottom (what??), an accomplice to the Lestranges Rabastan, Rodolphus, and Bellatrix ( _what??_ ), and was promptly sentenced to Azkaban. He died a year later and was disposed of as usual.

He can’t accept that.

In the back of Voldemort’s mind he knows he is being irrational. He also knows that he ought to accept it. But he can’t. He just can’t. He can’t think –

Maybe it’s all the children whom he teaches now. He has to assume it’s them, that he’s gotten used to the sight of people looking up at him with excitement in their eyes and eager questions on their lips. It’s gotten to the point that every lecture he gives, every time a student babbles an idea at him in office hours, something contrives to remind him of Barty. Barty, who was perhaps the first of them all, not that any of these children know this, to look up and grin excitedly and ask questions with the most intense of attentions on Voldemort –

It’s intolerable that he has to wait until Yule break to do this.

  


There’s some sort of kerfluffle over Harry’s permission slip for Hogsmeade. Voldemort voices his opinion that not only is it setting a potentially dangerous precedent to executively bar a student with a legitimate signature from school activities, telling Harry Potter that he cannot go to Hogsmeade as part of the supervised, official group is just asking for the child to go to Hogsmeade unsupervised and without an adult in easy shouting distance.

Somehow, he manages to make them agree. Even Albus Dumbledore just hums and nods.

That’s new.

Minerva seems disappointed in him. He cannot imagine why. It isn’t as if Sirius Black is guilty of being a Death Eater. No matter how questionably sane long dementor exposure may have rendered the man, to be lucid enough to mysteriously escape and then also to avoid recapture for so long indicates that Black is also lucid enough to recognise Harry as Harry. As he is no Death Eater, he’s harmless to the boy. The dementors are a worse threat.

_He’s at Hogwarts..._

Who is at Hogwarts? So many people are at Hogwarts – why would it be Harry? Then again, what innocent man wouldn’t wish to see his godson?

Voldemort isn’t in the mood to investigate, in any case.

  


Apparently, Sirius Black is not only lucid enough to sneak into the school in the middle of the Halloween feast, but to knife portraits out of frustration.

In all honesty, Voldemort relates.

  


The downside – Harry’s Hogsmeade permissions are revoked now, with ‘cause’. The child rants about it in Voldemort’s office, mister Weasley and miss Granger there and ranting with him. Voldemort is not quite sure when he became a host for children ranting. He is also not quite sure when his office became a space for miss Granger and mister Weasley to hang out _with_ Harry.

They’re even doing their bloody homework in here. He’s this close to magicking up a side room for them so he can get some distance.

It is during one of these homework sessions that Voldemort notices how stressed miss Granger seems to have gotten as the semester went by. It is also during one of these homework sessions that she nearly snaps both the boys heads off in quick succession, and then appears to barely restrain herself from bursting into tears.

Voldemort decides that, ex-Dark Lord though he may be, he probably ought to consider dispensing wisdom once in a while. For this reason, he comes silently around the desk and wandlessly summons all of the girl’s books and stationary to his hands.

She whirls on him and gasps in offense, as is her character. “You – professor! I need those!”

“You do not need them right now,” says Voldemort without amusement. He flicks a finger and her wand sails into his grasp for good measure. “I am removing your access to school materials for at least an hour while you rest and calm down.”

“What?!” she nearly shrieks, and leaps up. “I – no! I have homework! I have so much homework! I still have the essay for runes and I need to do my arithmancy proofs and I _need my wand!_ You’re a professor, you can’t want me to fail!”

Voldemort stares down at her for a moment. She keeps his gaze, to her credit. (Are all of Harry’s friends like this, or is she merely too used to him by now to be intimidated, even though she knows that Lord Voldemort sits underneath Thomas Moregrave’s mask?)

“How is it that you are in Ancient Runes, miss Granger?” he asks slowly. “Harry has informed me that you are not in his class.”

She flushes, and breaks eye contact finally. “I’m – I’m in the Ravenclaw/Hufflepuff segment.”

“Whyever are you in that segment? Surely there’s not a…”

A scheduling conflict, he was about to say, before he realises what he would have said. Ancient Runes is not in conflict with anything else a third year Gryffindor might need to attend, but it _would_ be in conflict with… And Trelawney is _picky_ about her class times…

Voldemort flips quickly through the notes and homeworks in his hands. True to form, and helpfully for him, miss Granger has organised them alphabetically. Arithmancy – Astronomy – Care – Charms – Defense – Divination…

Once upon a time, such a course load was possible. With the changes made under Albus Dumbledore, it is decidedly not.

Miss Granger looks horrified by what he supposes is his realisation. She must see it in his face.

“Who gave you permission for this escapade, miss Granger?” he asks. Behind her, the boys are watching with the blank looks of somebody for whom the Monty Python skit is going over their heads.

“It’s not a – ”

“Somebody signed off on this, miss Granger. That is how schools work. Who is aware?”

She looks mutinous. It’s not as unbreakable as Harry’s stubborn face. With coaxing, Voldemort wrenches an admission of ‘Professor McGonagall’ from her, and it is not a lie.

If only he could get through this bloody year without having to yell at all of his colleagues. He thinks he would quite like that.

  


“You gave a young teenage girl a time turner?!” he hears himself screeching. “Do you have any concept what that could do to her growth?!”

  


Albus Dumbledore refuses to remove the time turner. Voldemort is quite certain he will fill an entire notebook with excessively elaborate murder plots for a single man, and that single man is Albus Dumbledore.

Because adults are not rational, he turns his attention to children. Ironically, when he does this, he can convince miss Granger to have some degree of sense, and to agree to fixed and homework-less rest periods, which Harry and mister Weasley will assist Voldemort with enforcing.

“And I will ask you regularly if you have taken any extra trips. If you lie, I will know, and I will do my best to remove it from you again.”

“How could you possibly know if I were lying?”

“He would totally know, ‘Mione. He knows when people are lying.”

“What? He just _knows?_ ”

“Yeah, it’s this thing called, uh, ledgle-mancy, and when you’re born with it…”

  


“ _This school year will be the death of me_ ,” he moans to Nagini that night.

“ _Aren’t we immortal?_ ” she hisses doubtfully.

  


When Yule finally hits, Voldemort sleeps in for the entire first day.

On the second day, he wakes up to a certain mister Weasley knocking on his private quarters. First he wonders how the boy even found him, and then, he decides he does not care.

He tugs a black dressing gown over his lounge clothing and opens the door. Mister Weasley is standing there looking both uncomfortable and determined, in a manner oddly reminiscent of Harry’s edition of those emotions.

“Can I help you?” Voldemort asks.

The boy pauses for a moment, and then nods. He says nothing.

Voldemort sighs and opens the door further, gesturing him inside. The resilience of children simply will never cease to amaze him.

Mister Weasley sits on one of the armchairs and Voldemort moves to get the teapot when he realises that Nagini is crawling her way out of their bedroom. He hisses at her to go away, and she ignores him, instead moving closer to the boy on the armchair.

“Fer fock’s sake,” he mutters, and moves to yank her back. She dodges him and hisses at him, mock-spreading her hood.

Mister Weasley is staring at Nagini with wide eyes. “So that’s… er…”

“Nagini. She is being a pest.” Voldemort glares at her for another moment and then passes the boy a teacup.

“She’s big.”

“She is a king cobra, and king cobras get very large. Mister Weasley, why are you here?”

With a breath, the boy begins to speak.

“Harry was telling us about Sirius Black,” he begins, and Voldemort has to beat off the urge to put his head in his hands and cry in frustration. Why does everyone care so much about Sirius Black?! “He says he’s innocent, and that he’s not scared of him because there’s no way Black will hurt him. But he _is_ trying to find him, I think?”

“Is he now?” Voldemort asks, and gives up, putting a hand to his forehead anyway.

“Yeah,” mister Weasley says. “He said you said he was innocent.”

“Innocence is relative,” Voldemort says. “However, I can assure you that Sirius Black was never a Death Eater, and I never considered trying to convert him, either. He was far too attached to Harry’s father, who was firmly against me. He wouldn’t have a Dark Mark.”

“Huh,” mister Weasley says. For a moment he stares down at his teacup, and says nothing more. Voldemort relishes the blessed silence, even as Nagini creeps back up and uses her snout to prod the young Weasley’s leg experimentally. To the boy’s credit, he noticed her coming, and does not even flinch. Instead, he waves at her.

Voldemort desperately needs his vacation.

“So,” mister Weasley says, “if he’s not here to kill Harry… what’s he here for?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, frankly,” Voldemort acknowledges. “I haven’t given it much thought because I do not care and because I have dementors to worry about. Lupin may be a place to start, though. He ran in the same circles as Black and James Potter. He was their other best friend, as far as I’m aware.”

“I’ve already talked to him,” mister Weasley says, and his face twists oddly. “He kept inviting Harry for tea, so we all went together. I don’t think he expected me and ‘Mione to show up, but he told us about how he was friends with Harry’s dad, and Black, and Pettigrew.”

“Ugh,” Voldemort scoffs.

“Ugh?”

“Pettigrew. I am not fond of him.”

He thinks, for a moment, that he can see the cogs turning in mister Weasley’s head. He wonders just how the other professors could have failed so much to activate the boy’s mind until this moment. “... Pettigrew is the traitor,” Ronald Weasley says slowly. “Not Black.”

“Correct. Didn’t Harry tell you that?”

“He didn’t really mention Black wasn’t a Death Eater, so… guess he’s distracted?”

The cogs are still turning. Ronald Weasley is mouthing silent words to himself, not articulated enough for Voldemort to make an attempt at lip-reading.

Voldemort goes into the bedroom and changes into his day robes behind a closed door. When he returns, the boy is finishing his tea, looking unnervingly calm.

“Is whatever you have realised going to cause the school roof to come crashing on all of our heads?” he asks.

“Don’t reckon so.”

“Is a classmate going to harm themselves or another?”

“No, definitely not.”

They are not lies.

“Then please go deal with your revelation in a different location. I wish to have breakfast. If you would also tell Harry I may be out for the next day or two, I would be appreciative.”

  


He has to force himself to add in the ritual fail-safes that will contain the backlash, should the boy be dead when the scrying seeks his Mark. (He shouldn’t have to. It isn’t necessary. He cannot accept this – )

Voldemort slaps some sense back into himself, and tells himself it is just in case he has plucked up the blonde lock of some dead Malfoy instead of Barty’s curls. (He would never mistake Barty’s blonde for a Malfoy’s platinum.)

When this is over he is going to sleep for a day again.

  


Instead of nothing, the ritual finds something.

  


Voldemort wears his old battle robes when he apparates, perhaps out of a sense of nostalgia. Disillusioned and silenced to the gills, he appears about a half kilometer from the beacon, and then moves in. Closer. He skirts a number of oblivious muggle late-nighters, until at the mouth of one street, he finds a barrier. Muggle ward. A wizarding street, then.

He slips inside with ease – no proximity alarms – and walks down the street, sticking to the shadows. Even with that strange bubble of light, fizzing relief inside of his chest, pressing on his ribs, something about all this feels wrong. The hairs on the nape of his neck are telling him he should be wary of enemies, and it is for this reason that his wand – yew, _Voldemort’s_ – is out and in his hand.

The beacon leads him to a townhouse. He pauses before the gate, does not touch it, and looks.

 _Crouch_ , says the name plate.

With care, Voldemort presses a gentle hand foreward. Wards, DMLE-level, curve under his curious touch. He curls his fingers the slightest amount, and they threaten to spark and wail in warning.

He withdraws his hand, and stands across the street for the remainder of the night, watching.

When dawn arrives, he leaves. Back at Hogwarts sooner than expected, he puts on Thomas Moregrave’s face, and spikes his morning chocolate coffee right in front of Minerva’s scandalised nose, because he simply _does not care_.

He can see the shape of something, and he despises it.

In order to take corrective action, though, he will need an alibi. Rather, Thomas Moregrave needs an alibi. It will be blamed on Lord Voldemort regardless. Would he use – ? He wants to. Wants to make his rage real, tangible, visible to others. But he also enjoys the anonymity of nobody believing he has returned. And yet again –

If Thomas Moregrave has an alibi…

Thomas Moregrave is just a returned ex-pat, a teacher. Lord Voldemort is a boogeyman without a face. And Thomas Voldemort Riddle...

Well, he’s retired, but that does not mean he has to drop everything about himself forever.

  


“Miss Granger. I appreciate you being willing to meet a professor during a holiday.”

“I think that we’re a little past just a professor-student relationship at this point, professor, considering everything.”

She doesn’t call him ‘Moregrave’ anymore, Voldemort notes with contemplation. He shuffles his plotting journal to the side and settles back in his chair. “No,” he murmurs, “I suppose we are indeed past that. Admittedly, complicity is not on the books of law in this polity as being a criminal offense… technically, you could walk away freely if anyone ever pointed out the truth.”

The look on her face is almost amusing in and of itself. He desperately needs some amusement to take his mind off of everything.

“I somehow can’t see that being rigorously applied in your – well, our – case.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. They wouldn’t even give me a trial,” Voldemort hums, and puts his chin on his hands. “Not that they could catch or hold me.”

“... Is something happening?” the young lady in front of him asks slowly. Her eyebrows have pulled steadily into a furrow the longer she’s sat there.

“Something has not happened yet,” Voldemort corrects. “I daresay, miss Granger, that you have opinions on the nature of the justice system, and especially on the human rights violations which occur in that oubliette of an excuse for a prison?”

“A lot of opinions,” Hermione Granger says, voice clipped. He can hear buried rage in there. Good.

“How much information would you require in order to allow me some use of your time turner, that I might create an alibi for what is inevitably going to make the papers?”

“I won’t let you break people out of Azkaban.”

Voldemort smirks at the hidden shake in her voice – expertly hidden, if he says so himself.

“I am not going to do that. As far as I am concerned, regretful as it is to say this, they are all insane. They have been in that prison for a decade or more. Whatever people they were, they have been ruined. They are not going to come back. Sirius Black is an anomaly – I have some theories as to the why of his lucidity. But he is just that – anomaly. To retrieve others has no purpose, not when they’ve like as not retreated as deep into their own minds as they can go to live in a happy place where the dementors cannot get them.”

For a long moment, she stares at him with wide eyes. Voldemort wonders if perhaps he should not have been so dramatic in his descriptions of dementor exposure.

“... Okay,” she finally says, and draws herself up. “Right. So. If you don’t want to break people out of Azkaban, what are you going to do that would make the papers?”

“There is a man who I want dead, and I plan to use some of my old calling cards.”

“Why do you want him dead?” she fires back. Not ‘maybe don’t murder him’, but ‘does he deserve it’. Voldemort privately approves.

“There are many reasons I could give you,” Voldemort tells her. “Let’s say the first and foremost reason is that I have evidence he has kept my once-apprentice, who I thought dead, captive in his townhouse for over a decade. Further, given that this apprentice was his son who went against his biological father’s politics to faithfully serve me, and given that this man is also the man who pushed for the Aurors to be able to use murder and torture curses at will during the war, and who willfully suspended all rights to trial during that time…”

He pauses and allows her to come to her own conclusions, which she does – admirably – with horror.

“You can see why I would have concerns.”

  


As miss Granger does not have need of the time turner during the holidays, she willingly hands it over to him. Voldemort gets immediately to work.

After some debate, he uses a set of glamours that makes him appear a woman, and with this is it easy to get house-elf records. He copies a nondescript muggle man he saw in the coffee shop to bluff his way into the Ministry archives, and then temporarily Imperiates the archivist to retrieve him the ward scheme that was placed on the Crouch residence. He makes copies (illegal, but what does he care?), sends the archivist back, removes her memories, and then pretends he has come for something silly and inconsequential. He walks out with the illegal ward schemas tucked inside his personnel files, and burns those when he gets back to Hogwarts.

It takes a few days of scribbling and sleeplessness to work out a plan of attack, given the ward schema and the floor plan he has available. He will need to cut the Floo off before beginning, and then disable the alarms before entering. It will be best done at dinnertime, and through an upper floor window. At dinnertime the elf will be distracted by serving food, the scum himself will be downstairs in the dining room to eat, and windows on the upper floors are always less likely to be warded and alarmed than ground floor windows or doors.

On Christmas Eve, he sleeps for most of the daylight hours before waking up to an alarm at four in the afternoon. He waits for the coded knock on the outside of his quarters – himself, out there, how odd – that tells him he can leave and need not worry about the alibi.

He leaves.

This time, he appears from the back, where a muggle house adjourns the magical street. There’s a stand of trees in the middle, likely as a better anchor for the deterrant wards. Voldemort creeps through them in battle robes. No glamour this time – just a dark cloth mask, pulled up over his mouth and nose. If there were a glamour he might not be as recognisable, and he wants Bartemius Crouch to know who he is. Red eyes will do this. At the same time…

He does not think the man has ever seen Voldemort’s skin. His hair. (Most people haven’t.) With that – skin and hair – he wonders if the man will have the self-awareness to realise that Voldemort is no boogeyman, but is yet human. Dangerous, but human.

He doubts it, but maybe it could happen.

The wards take only an hour to slip quietly away beneath his wand. The DMLE seems to have dropped their game in peacetime – or else, they simply have not had any advances in warding arithmancy. Their loss either way.

Voldemort enters the backyard and scopes out a darkened window that looks promising. Long range spells determine it is locked, but un-warded and un-alarmed. He unlocks it before flying up unaided, a smoke-like trail behind him, and enters. Inside is what appears to be a guest bedroom, entirely bare and unwelcoming. He bares his teeth at it and closes the window behind him, re-locking it with the same spell. Silencers to his feet and robes, focus rejecting spells to his entire body.

He proceeds carefully through the house, mindful of the floor plan. Now that he is inside, all he needs to bother with is whether or not he makes noise, and avoiding portraits. Every animated portrait he sees is hit by a special freezing spell, before they can do anything to out his presence.

Noises from below. Clattering. Dishes, he supposes. Voldemort proceeds, disillusioned and silent, down the stairs and hugs the wall so as not to alert the man eating dinner before him.

Crouch Senior is sitting such that his back is to Voldemort. This is useful, because he might still have been paranoid enough to notice a disillusionment. He breathes out a silent sigh of relief that plan A is a go, and creeps to the kitchen. The house elf is clattering pots and pans together in there, yet unaware. Voldemort does not get too close – the things are perceptive beyond illusions that fool human eyes. In a way, he has the dementors at Hogwarts to thank for his new knowledge of how to combat ex-fae creatures, though he feels this appreciation bitterly.

“ _Avada Kedavra_ ,” he whispers, sighting his wand at the elf.

It squeaks as it collapses, but it does collapse.

The squeak might have been barely audible. Certainly audible, however, is the iron pot that crashes to the flagstones of the kitchen floor. Voldemort moves seconds before it strikes, flinging the disillusionment from himself and charging back to the dining room. Crouch is standing, his eyes wild, but even as the wand shoots into the man’s hand – delayed reaction, assuming error on the elf’s part rather than an intruder, foolish oversight – Voldemort’s magic reaches out and yanks the wand away. He flings it far from the both of them, unwilling to try catching it for himself, and in the next racing step he is right in front of the scrambling man.

An impulse strikes, and he passes his wand to his left hand before hauling back and _striking_. It has been a terribly long time since Lord Voldemort brawled in the muggle manner, but if nothing else, his upper body strength is as it has been, and most mages have no concept of how to dodge a sucker punch.

Crouch crashes to the ground, feet still trying to scramble away. Voldemort stomps a foot down on the man’s midsection and casts his preferred set of binding and paralysis spells. Then he hauls back and kicks the man in the temple, hard, for good measure.

“Where iss he?” he hisses furiously, his words English but his old lisp present.

“You – ” the man spits, his whole body shaking furiously. Effort? Terror? Both? Pain additionally? “Dumbledore – _no_ – ”

Voldemort casts a silencer on the dining room and then cruciates the man. It eases some stress.

“You will tell me where the boy iss,” he repeats, once the choked noises from the torture curse have eased enough to potentially allow speech.

“You can’t have him!”

Voldemort, almost idly, rests a boot on the man’s throat. He is making eye contact, which is his own fool undoing. Also foolish is the surface level thought of where the boy is – basement – which Voldemort rips easily from the man.

“Die,” he says, and kills Bartemius Crouch.

He heads to the basement. There are wards, but he splinters his way through them and steps down the stairs. There is an additional ward line across part of the basement floor. On the other side of that line there is a cot, a terribly small bookshelf with a few meager books on it, and a fairy light floating in the upper corner of the room. There is no sign of a human.

Frowning, Voldemort steps forward. As he steps he sees a strange sense of movement, the light bending. A set of pale fingertips appears dangling from the bed, with no apparent hand to attach to.

Invisibility cloak – ?

Voldemort shatters the warded line just as easily and rushes to the cot. His grasping fingers find the silky fabric of an invisibility cloak, and he rips it away and casts it aside.

Beneath…

“Barty?” he whispers.

The boy on the mattress is sickly.

He is too pale, paler even than Voldemort, as if he has been locked in darkness for years. (Probably true.) His hair is lank, dull, and lifeless. His eyes are sunken, dark bruises below them, and his cheeks are hollow and gaunt. Though the eyes are open, Voldemort feels sure they are unfocused. They are blue, but this is the only thing that seems to spark Voldemort’s memory. The clothing – just a dull gray set of trousers and a once-white cotton tunic – is wrinkled and clearly too long in service.

The boy isn’t _moving_.

He is breathing, though, so Voldemort kneels down and pulls him up and into Voldemort’s lap. “Barty,” he repeats, voice louder – more urgent this time. His gloved fingers touch the boy’s haunted face without his own permission, stroking gently down a cheek. “Barty, say something if you are able.”

There’s a ragged breath, and no speech. But the boy does laboriously squeeze his eyes shut, an agonised look across his face. In horror, Voldemort casts diagnostics looking for injury, worried he worsened something, but physically the bones and blood are all intact. Nutritionally, he is a wreck, but – prison does that.

“Barty,” he repeats firmly. “Speak. This is an order.”

A faint whimper, this time. The eyes still don’t open.

“pleas’...” is all Voldemort hears.

Please what? But does that matter? He has to remove the boy immediately, has to work out how to deal with a destroyed person at the same time as he is Thomas Moregrave the Hogwarts professor who has no time –

Time. Hm.

And then again…

The idea forming in Voldemort’s mind is terribly risky and could potentially backfire in many ways. Then again, using the time turner multiple times would be potentially risky and could potentially backfire in many ways, and would have the added complication of requiring coordination with Hermione Granger once term starts back up.

Besides, who would think to ask, even if they knew of the room?

Carefully, he gathers up the boy in his arms and stands. (He’s too light. He was always light, but he shouldn’t be this light.) The books, the only belongings he can see, are shrunken and tucked into Voldemort’s pocket. The remainder of the furniture is destroyed with a twirl of his wand. He erases all trace of the ward line, of the other broken wards around the basement, and then moves with purpose about the kitchen and the ground floor, setting strategic spots on fire.

Because he is feeling whimsical, he wrecks the corpse of Senior post-mortem, dismembering it and casting the pieces about the dining room. With one final fire set, he pauses before the back door. Kicks it open, uses the discarded invisibility cloak on himself and the boy in his arms.

“ _Ignis Infernus_ ,” he intones, and a massive basilisk of flame shoots forth to engulf the place. He races backwards to the treeline, and when he is ensconced in shadow, he raises the wand once more.

“ _Morsmordre_ ,” he hisses.

The green snake bursts from his wand, and he disapparates.

  


Sometimes, he wonders what Albus Dumbledore would say if he knew he had granted Lord Voldemort unrestrained, teacherly access to Hogwarts.

He cannot wait on the grounds, despite his misgivings – Barty is not clothed for the winter. Instead, still invisible, Voldemort flies them both up to the astronomy tower once he checks that no students are using the location as an excuse to snog. From there he proceeds carefully to the seventh floor, where he paces before the hidden room and wishes for a bedchamber worthy of somebody loyal.

The room that reveals itself is plush. It reminds Voldemort of the guest bedroom he often used at Lestrange Manor, back when he stayed for months at a time prior to the height of the war. He mentally asks the room for an appropriate set of clean sleep-clothes, and is granted dark gray trousers and a soft dove-gray tunic. He spells them onto the still catatonic boy and burns the previous clothing perfunctorily before tucking his only loyal follower into the bed.

He sits at that bedside for a while, hood down and mask removed, but everything else still speaking of Lord Voldemort. (Funny how he’s in the middle of Hogwarts right now, looking like the Dark Lord, and nobody knows.) While he waits, Barty stirs occasionally, but never seems to calm – always whimpers, instead, when his eyes open, and then squeezes them shut again. Voldemort is starting to suspect some sort of denial – something mental, at least. It’s not that the light is too bright, or that he is afraid of Lord Voldemort. Barty has never been afraid of Lord Voldemort. He shouldn’t be.

He strokes the hair, lank as it is, while he thinks. This too is something Lord Voldemort and Barty always had – touch. He would touch the boy’s hair while the boy knelt, or while the boy massaged his feet – perhaps they can do that again some day. He isn’t sure what use he has for a servant when he is Thomas Moregrave more often than Lord Voldemort and when he is retired and self-sufficient, but he can’t just leave the boy there. The others, he could. He feels no guilt. The thought of abandoning the boy, so like his students –

Well, no.

Loathe though Voldemort is to leave the boy like this, he needs to be assured of his ability to care for him. He also needs to know that Barty will not wander, and so he adds a gentle nagging ward to the bed and ties it to the boy’s Mark. It will allow him to get up, but will gently nudge him back to bed the longer he remains upright, and will pain him if he goes for the door. Perhaps a note, as well…

He scratches one out hastily and leaves it on the bedside table before taking the invisibility cloak and going back to his quarters. When nearly there, he ducks into an unused classroom and checks the time – just about 8 pm – before turning the time turner. He returns to existence in the same room, with actual sunlight outside, and knocks on the door of his quarters.

Inside he hears a door, and footsteps. Himself. He does not know yet what he will find, and this thought makes Voldemort muse once more.

A minute after he hears the inner window open, he slips inside and changes back into Thomas Moregrave. A pepper-up potion restores some energy, for his body thinks he ought to sleep, and then he heads to his office to get some work done before dinner.

Around five, Harry, Ronald Weasley, and Hermione Granger pop in. Harry points at him accusingly. “You were gone all day!”

“Sometimes I deserve to sleep in, Harry.”

He slips Hermione the time turner when they leave to go to dinner. She looks at him for a long moment, and he merely smiles.

  


Albus Dumbledore receives an urgent letter soon after dinner begins. He pales when he reads it. Voldemort sips on his soup and thinks about a half-dead boy on the seventh floor.

  


On Christmas morning, Voldemort is woken up by children battering on the door of his teacher’s quarters. He was planning to sleep in – had indeed resolved to ignore the knocking, before it turned into battering.

“ _Nagini, bite them_ ,” he hisses blearily, and tries to shove his head under the pillows.

“ _Won’t_ ,” she argues. “ _I’m not biting our hatchling. Bite him yourself._ ”

“ _Humans don’t bite each other, you know that…_”

In the end he drags himself upright and actually forgets to turn back to Thomas Moregrave before he opens the door a bit and glares out at the assorted faces and hair colors. The same Three as always. Of course.

“Do you require something?” he grinds out.

“It’s Christmas!” Harry chirps.

Is it? Voldemort hasn’t been keeping track. “So?”

Harry looks scandalised, as, oddly, does Ronald. Miss Granger looks merely satisfied, as if she’s had a hypothesis confirmed.

“It’s Christmas,” Harry repeats. “I brought all my presents with me and so did Ron and Hermione, and I thought maybe we could open them here.”

“... Don’t you have a dorm for that?” Voldemort asks, and yet he is already letting them in. Being a teacher is utterly ruining him.

From the bedroom he thinks he can hear Nagini laughing. He ignores her to get himself some coffee, adding chocolate to it as has become his norm.

“Issat what you really look like?” Ronald is asking, having appeared at his side without even alerting Voldemort to his approach. Dear Morgana, he must truly be exhausted to be so out of it.

“It is.”

“You don’t seem so scary.”

“I’m not making one of the scary faces right now, so of course not.”

Instead of taking it as a joke, Ronald only nods seriously. “Makes sense.”

He hates Christmas. But he does sit through the children opening their presents. Far be it from him to investigate why they want to do this in his presence, and not in their dorm, which is perfectly available to them and ought to suffice.

He is then further pushed into consternation when Harry comes up to him and shoves a couple of awkwardly wrapped packages into his hands.

“I am not holding your things for you,” he tells the boy, and tries to push them back at him.

“They’re not my things, they’re your things,” Harry says, and stubbornly doesn’t take them. “They’re presents from me!”

The child is bouncing. Why is he bouncing? It’s too early for this level of energy.

“I don’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Well, too bad, I got you presents and you’re stuck with them. Open them!”

He feels strange.

Because it’s too early, and because he is exhausted from his extra hours last night spent rescuing Barty, Voldemort gives in far more easily than he ought to. When he peels the paper away he finds a terribly well-made black leather journal, inscribed with bronze privacy runes around the edges and up the spine. The smaller packages are a set of inkwells and a fountain pen, respectively.

“I thought about getting you a book,” Harry says, as if confiding, “but I reckoned you probably already own all the books in the world anyway. But you write all the time so you always need more notebooks. Hermione helped me pick out the ink and the pen, and Ron helped me…”

He opens the journal and touches the paper as the babbling washes over him. It’s very fine quality. The fountain pen looks expensive, the inks as well. Voldemort has to presume that, as Harry did not have to spend his trust vault withdrawal on school supplies this year, he has instead invested the money in Christmas presents.

It’s not that he’s never received Christmas presents before. In the orphanage the matrons bought something for the children every year. When you were young you received candies to eat with dinner. The five year olds received stuffed bears. (He hadn’t, but that was because he had stopped respecting the curfew rules and so was not given his Christmas present that year.) The six year olds received their first school primers. The seven year olds received a Bible… and so it went.

His closer followers, those who went to Hogwarts at the same time as he, had once or twice bought him presents that matched his reputation, or which were intended to flatter him and to get them into his good graces. Now as a professor, his colleagues give him things that he supposes Thomas Moregrave might appreciate, and he gives them all rote gifts in order to not be seen as unsociable – but he receives nothing that really carves to the heart of who he is.

He’s not sure if he’s ever received a Christmas present based on who he is.

  


Harry also receives a Firebolt, and immediately begins to act dodgy. Voldemort is quite sure he heard the beginnings of ‘this is from Sirius’ fall from the child’s lips, and he resolutely plugs his ears and tells the child not to let any of the other staff catch him cavorting with his questionably-a-convict godfather.

The look that Harry gives him ought to be unsettling. He’s too deep in his coffee mug to really feel it.

  


In the afternoon, when he feels a tug on his being coming from a Dark Mark somewhere upstairs, he puts on his Thomas Moregrave face and heads to the seventh floor. Barty is sitting up in bed, staring at the wall across from him with haggard countenance, and clutching his left forearm as if it is preventing him from drowning.

His head snaps to Voldemort when he enters. A trembling hand lifts up a knife – _where did he get a knife?_ “You – !”

He’s suspicious, because of course this is not Voldemort’s face. Voldemort clenches his fist and forces the Mark to flare in warning. The boy’s fingers go slack, and Voldemort reaches up his sleeve to yank off the transformation stone. Thomas Moregrave melts away, leaving Lord Voldemort – no – Thomas Voldemort Riddle? – in his place.

“Stop,” he orders.

The knife falls from Barty’s hands easily, and Voldemort summons it to him and has the room remove it. The boy is still haggard, but awed, too. He stares at Voldemort as if he is witnessing a miracle.

“master…?” he whispers. Then, before Voldemort can reply, shudders wrack his frame. Thin, fragile-looking hands tug at his own hair and he begins to sob pitifully. “i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i w-was weak, i’m sorry, i’m _sorry_ – ”

Voldemort is too tired to deal with this right now. He moves close and pushes the boy back into the pillows. “Are you going to disrespect the work I put into retrieving you by neglecting your own recovery and attacking me, Barty?”

“No!” the boy gasps – as if the very suggestion is an affront to dignity. “No, master, never, I’d never – I’d never – I – ”

“Breathe,” Voldemort orders. He holds the boy down for two minutes, then a bit more, until he judges that the body beneath him has gone limp and the breathing has slowed back to a manageable pace. “Very good. I will ask you some questions. You will answer. Understood?”

“Yes, master,” the boy whispers.

“Do you understand where you are?”

Those blue eyes flit around the room. “n – no, master, not r-really… I’m sorry, I – ”

“Stop apologising to me,” Voldemort snaps. The boy’s mouth snaps shut. “Good. If I require an apology, you will know, because I will tell you. Stop assuming. Do you understand this?”

There is a strange wobble to the boy’s face, but all he says is “yes, master.”

“Do you understand how you came to be here?”

A shudder, but the boy speaks. “I…” he whispers. “I was in… but then you, then master was there… except you were real, and I didn’t believe it, but you were real, and there were fires and… and then we were outside…”

He was real. Of course.

The boy’s sanity is… questionable. Yet there’s a solidity to it, focused entirely on his master’s presence, that holds sway despite an otherwise fragmented set of associations. Voldemort tries not to imagine how much that is reliant on Voldemort being here in the moment. Can the boy manage object permanence, if he orders him to do something while he is gone?

After some more questioning, he thinks he will.

The room produces food from the kitchens for them, and Voldemort feeds the boy water and a light broth soup. Barty is nearly inconsolable for some reason, but Voldemort is not going to let those trembling hands try to hold a hot bowl of soup on their own, and tells him to lay back and allow himself to be tended to.

Again, for some reason, this reduces the boy to tears.

When the soup and water are gone, Voldemort orders the boy to rest until he can return. He believes that he will be obeyed, and it is not merely a hope. Whatever damage has been done, Voldemort can fix it if his once apprentice is so focused on pleasing him.

He tells himself this.

  


“Thomas, my boy, is everything alright? It’s Christmas, surely you should feel some cheer?”

Voldemort stares at Albus Dumbledore for a long moment. Finally, he manages to pull his face into a sort of grimace.

“I would like to,” he says softly, as if confiding. “But… I saw the paper this morning.”

Albus Dumbledore grows solemn with him, though Voldemort knows that while the older man is solemn because of the man sitting next to him, Voldemort himself is solemn because of the broken boy on the seventh floor.

  


“please, master,” the boy begs. “I can work. I can be useful. please let me help. are you – is your disguise a trap for somebody? are you trying to kill Dumbledore? kill Harry Potter? I can help. I’ll do anything. _please_ – ”

“You’ll do nothing but recover. There is nothing more useful that could be done right now.”

  


On New Years Day, Voldemort is ambushed by a small child – Harry – who shoves a package into his hands and proclaims it his birthday present. The boy then races off again before Voldemort can reject it, because he does _not_ celebrate his birthday.

When he finally opens it that evening, he discovers a cravat-tying brooch in the form of an emerald-inlaid snake – a cobra, when he examines it further – and he feels for a long moment like he is going to fall apart.

  


The school year finally manages to settle down during the second semester.

The Ministry, in a tizzy due to Crouch’s death, quickly ascribes it to Black with no evidence and removes most of the dementors from Hogwarts. The dementors that remain, properly intimidated by a multitude of children taught ruthless self-defense against the creatures, are keeping their distance. Honeydukes happily renews its bulk discount with him. Albus Dumbledore even cheerily tops up his salary with a Christmas bonus that covers the entire set of expenses, and while on the one hand Voldemort happily accepts any money he can drain from that man, he also wants to gag at the smile he gets when it is offered to him.

Hermione Granger is no longer trying to work herself into a frenzy due to her classload. During a few advising sessions, he talks her through all her classes until she can understand which courses are adding value to her education, and which are useless when you get down to it. She decides she will be dropping Divination and Muggle Studies next year, and good riddance in his opinion.

The three children continue to haunt his office hours, and even ambush him in his private quarters sometimes. Hermione Granger has different sort of frenzy, more of a panic, when she first meets Nagini. Apparently king cobras are known ‘man-killers’, at least in the muggle world. Voldemort has to admit he wouldn’t know – wizarding Britain is woefully bereft in the realm of herpetology. After some talks, and after Ronald and Harry demonstrate that Nagini is quite amenable to scale scratches, she loses her tenseness around the large snake.

He is starting to get used to having his space filled by children, and he does not know how to feel about this.

Everybody seems to have forgotten about Sirius Black, and it is glorious. Harry’s Hogsmeade privileges are restored, given that Black is assumed to have returned to London to wreak havoc in the Dark Lord’s name, and Voldemort is told all about this triumph the Friday before the first Hogsmeade weekend of the new year.

Barty continues to heal the more regular meals and rest Voldemort forces into him. When he has the boy begin to grade some of the essays and simpler assignments in his stead, it becomes even easier to see the progress. Apparently the boy needs to feel useful in order to feel secure, and Voldemort is quite sure he can find things for Barty to do that Voldemort has had to neglect. Soon the vast majority of Voldemort’s grading is being done by the boy, and the Dark Lord turned professor is gratified to find that Barty easily adopts the standards Voldemort has already set for work.

The explanation of Voldemort’s cover is a bit more delicate. Rather, Voldemort expects it to be delicate – but when he sits the boy down and informs him that Lord Voldemort, Dark Lord, is retired, the boy only nods, and his eyes grow wide.

“And you picked me?” he asks, breathless.

“What have I picked you out of?”

“Of all your followers,” Barty breathes. “Of all of them – I’m the only one you’re – ”

“The only one I am retaining for the next portion of my life? Yes.”

That haunted look falls away for the first time.

  


After a few more careful conversations, Voldemort introduces Barty to Harry.

It goes unexpectedly well.

“Is he coming home with us over the summer?” Harry inquires near the end of the visit, and Barty – somehow – chokes on air.

“I was planning on this, yes,” Voldemort replies – and the boy is crying again. Voldemort diagnoses them, fairly confidently, as tears of happiness. Harry, disgustingly, gives the boy a hug, and they spend a moment clinging together before Voldemort has to return Harry to the fray lest Thomas Moregrave be accused of kidnapping.

  


Thomas Moregrave’s private quarters are connected to Thomas Moregrave’s office through the Floo system. This is not technically something the professor is supposed to have done, or even have had the skill to do, but Thomas Moregrave is in fact Thomas Voldemort Riddle, and so he has, in fact, done so. He makes use of it solely to escape from Albus and to bring Nagini into his office in the late evening so that they can spend some time together in a different setting.

He has, however, also given Harry the password to get in and out. Said password, being in Parseltongue, is in Voldemort’s opinion quite secure. Given that he has also effectively taken on a duty of care for the boy, giving Harry a place of refuge with a hidden passage to get there seems only sensible. What if he ever needs to flee from somebody relentless? Nobody would be able to follow him.

Foolproof, as Voldemort opined when he taught Harry how to use it.

All this does nothing to change the fact that one late evening during the first week of exams, Harry comes crashing in through the Floo, while Voldemort is not wearing his Thomas Moregrave glamour, and is pursued through that same Floo by a large black dog.

Nagini, who was coiled contently around Voldemort’s shoulders, rears up and hisses, hood fully spread. Voldemort leaps to his feet and draws his wand. Harry collapses to the floor with a ‘oof’. The dog dashes between Harry and Voldemort and begins to bark.

None of this makes any sense at all.

“Harry, what are you doing?” Voldemort asks. On his shoulders, Nagini’s hood is folding back in slowly, but her rigid posture has not dissipated.

Harry groans, sits up, and gasps before yanking the dog back. “Padfoot, no, he’s fine!” 

“When did you get a dog?” The dog has not stopped barking.

“It’s fine!” Harry shouts, and it’s unclear who he’s addressing. Voldemort is eyeing the dog warily, because it looks liable to rush off and try to gnaw his ankled to the bone at first opportunity. “It’s just Padfoot!”

“Why are you using the safe connection now of all times? Do we need to leave?”

“We were just running from Snape! He’ll probably give up,” Harry babbles. “I mean, you said the Floo would leave no trace, and he wanted to feed Sirius to the dementors, and I still can’t keep my corporeal Patronus up for very long plus I mean he’s _Snape_ so I decided it would be better to run away and – ”

“Sirius?” Voldemort repeats blankly. At this point his wand has fallen back to his side in shock. He had been having such a wonderful second semester, not having to hear about Sirius Black. Why is the boy bringing this intrusion into his life _now_?

“Can Padfoot come home with us this summer?” Harry says, hanging onto the quiet, still faintly growling dog by the neck.

“Come _home_ – ”

Voldemort feels he might be short-circuiting.

“That’s a dog, Harry, I don’t want a dog in my house. I am not a dog person, I’m a snake person if anything – Surely Ronald will be willing to care for it over the summer? I can forge some documents or some such nonsense if you want to have it around during the next school year – ”

“I just want to make sure he’s safe! _Please_ Dad?!”

_Dad?_

Voldemort is struck dumb in a way he hasn’t been since he was young. He freezes, and his lungs freeze as well, holding his current breath inside of him without allowing him to continue breathing. He’s immortal, so this is fine, but he still cannot quite fathom what he just heard. If he did, in fact, just hear what he just heard.

His attempts to regain a train of thought are interrupted by the dog wrenching itself away from Harry and becoming a painfully skinny, gaunt, sunken-eyed man wearing tattered Azkaban prison clothing and a grimy trenchcoat far too large for his haggard form. His dark hair is snarled – his gray eyes dart wildly between Harry, Voldemort, Nagini, the window, and the door. A hand shoots out and points at Voldemort, the single finger almost accusatory.

“Harry,” he says in a ragged voice, “ _what_ did you just call him?!”

**Author's Note:**

> “I still am not having a dog in my house. If he’s to come he will not use his animagus form.”
> 
> “I would never agree to – ”
> 
> “Okay!”
> 
> “Pup _no!_ ”


End file.
